GameCentral speaks to the only prominent female exec in the games business, about heading up Ubisoft Toronto, making video game movies, and the trouble with sequels…

We don’t get to talk to women much, or at least not as part of our job. Certainly there are plenty of women in games PR and female journalists are becoming increasingly common. But when we sit down to do an interview with the people that actually make games they’re almost always men.

But Jade Raymond is different, she’s not only a highly visible female games creator but she’s risen so far up the ranks at Ubisoft that she’s now responsible for the company’s brand new studio in Toronto – a position that puts her in charge of multiple next gen game projects.

She was recently in town to promote Splinter Cell: Blacklist, the studio’s first new game, and we were able to sit down and talk to her about the way the industry, and its products, treats women. Not only that but also her role overseeing the adaptation of games into movies, and what kind of game she’d make if she was an indie developer…

GC: Just to start can you give us a little background to your career, for those that might be curious?

JR: Well, I was a very determined little kid and also you get to be an age where everyone starts to ask you what you’re going to be when you grow up, and you figure you have to find an answer to give! [laughs] So, I like math and art a lot – those were my two favourite subjects – so I was trying to find a career that combined the two. And I was playing video games one day and I realised that people must get to make these as a job and it seemed like a good combination of math and art, or science and art, and so then I set my sights on getting into the games industry. So that was probably when I was around 12.

I had started doing some very basic… not really programming but Logo and I was building robots and stuff. And so I got into computers when I was a kid and so continued focusing on computers, went into computer science as my undergrad degree, and got my first job out of university as a programmer.

GC: So what kind of games were inspiring you at the age of 12?

JR: Well, I played a bunch of text adventures when I was really young, then I played Mario games and Tetris and all of those things. Duck Hunt, a lot of the things on the Super Nintendo. I played then a lot of fighting games… Tekken, Streets Of Rage. But yeah, I think I was probably playing the first Tekken or the second one around then…

GC: What was the first game you worked on? If I remember your Wikipedia entry, which I probably shouldn’t be assuming is correct, I think it was Pictionary or something like that?

JR: Oh, Jeopardy! Worse than Pictionary! [laughs] I programmed probably about 12 different types of Jeopardy, which is really not the most exciting thing you could do as a programmer – because once you make one version of Jeopardy they start to resemble each other. There’s College Jeopardy, Sports Jeopardy, you name it…

GC: That seems a reasonable place to start, but what was your first proper game? Was that The Sims Online, because that doesn’t sound like an easy gig.

JR: Yeah! [laughs] My first job I was just really happy to work in the games industry. Obviously my dream was not to work on Jeopardy games but I was just happy to be in the games industry. I was the network programmer, so I built up an expertise on the backend server side of games when not very many games were online at the time. And so I was recruited by EA to join The Sims Online, initially to manage the technical team. So I was producer of the programming side, and then I was promoted various times until I was producer of the content stuff. Which is kind of I guess the part I wanted to be involved in more. It was closer to the content and the gameplay.

GC: I think the first time I remember seeing you in the press, and I assume this is the case with most people, is with the first Assassin’s Creed. How much did you have to do with the inception of that project or were you brought in later?

JR: I had a big influence on it. After EA I did a games start-up, so I had stint at that before going to Ubisoft. And then I joined Ubisoft about nine years ago and it was to lead up Assassin’s Creed. At that point it wasn’t called Assassin’s Creed, it was a next gen project that wasn’t kind of defined yet but it was a next gen mandate with the team that just shipped [Prince Of Persia] The Sands Of Time. So obviously the creative director Patrice [Désilets] played a big role in shaping that game and I’d say that he and I and Corey May, the writer, were kind of the three people guiding the vision on it.

GC: So at that point was that you thinking you’d made it, that this is exactly the sort of game you wanted to be making?

JR: Yes! Oh, 100 per cent. [laughs] So that’s the type of game I got into the industry to be able to work on. There are all kinds of things that I’ve been interested in since I was a kid… it’s interesting that, I volunteered at the library when I was quite young, around 10, and I used to borrow all kinds of random books while I was volunteering. And I borrowed The Adventures of Marco Polo, I remember. Which is this huge book, and it left a real impression on me – I loved it – and in that book he encounters the Assassins.

So there was some things from the history, or the folklore around the Assassins, that marked me when I was a kid. And I’ve also really been into conspiracy theories and kind of the idea of the Templars and the Assassins and setting up a conspiracy between them is also something that was really exciting to me.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist – Ubisoft Toronto’s first big game

GC: One thing that always frustrates me about modern action games is that the majority of protagonists are just these horrible, hateful, purposefully unpleasant people. And yet the few that aren’t, the only ones that tend to show any real human emotion, are mostly women. The first hour or so of Tomb Raider is an obvious example and also, do you know the Capcom game Remember Me?

JR: No?

GC: Well, it wasn’t very good to be honest but I had a very interesting interview with the developer and he said there was no way he could make the main character male and still have them be that emotional and conflicted. So personally I’d like to see a lot more female characters in games, or more female-influenced characters, but is it patronising of me to suggest that of you? For all I know you’re the one sitting in meetings saying we should have more angry psychopaths as the protagonists.

JR: [laughs] I think that’s a great question. I agree we do need to have different types of characters as our protagonists and I think with video games what we tend to do is start out with the player fantasy of what is it that people really want to be – and what’s an exciting type of person that you wish you could always be? So I think Sam Fisher, for example, being an elite covert operative and having all of the resources at your disposal and being in charge, and having a plane you can fly everywhere… who hasn’t wanted to be a spy at some point?

And I think a lot of game conceptions start out that way. So instead of how do we make an interesting character or an interesting story or something that we haven’t seen before I think that the approach that games often take by default… that’s why they aren’t people like you or I, because they start with a ‘What’s that ultimate character that I am not?’

GC: It seems to me that video games are not very good at giving you what you didn’t realise you wanted. They always go for the obvious. And even the mature-rated ones still seem to be aiming primarily at an audience of angry teenage boys.

JR: [laughs] I did a GDC rant about games needing to grow up and the fact that they’re kind of caught in their smelly teenage years and that it’s time to give them a kick in the pants.

GC: What’s frustrating is that even if a game is more complex and sophisticated its marketing will still be aimed at 12-year-old boys.

JR: I agree, and do you know what sometimes I do find it insulting because gamers are typically much more intelligent than we give them credit for. And the fact that games have these [adopts movie trailer voice] crazy deep voices and it’s like every game thinks it needs to be the latest Michael Bay summer action flick. And of course I do love a mindless action flick, but I agree that games need to have a meaning and they need to grow up and they need to become a little more sophisticated. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for the Michael Bay action flick but I wish that it wasn’t all that. So I definitely agree with you.

There’s so many interesting themes to investigate, so many. And all of those themes could be a million times more powerful if you have them in an interactive medium, because in a game you don’t only get the message through the character and through the story but also the game mechanics can have meaning embedded in them. And so they can be even more impactful. So I’d like to see us go there.

But because games are interactive, and because you’re engaging the player and because you have that power, it also makes it hard sometimes to deal with those real subjects because it’s hard to keep the line in the right place and not have it be sensational.

GC: But what can facilitate that sort of change? Is it a question of who’s making the games, of gender or whatever? Or is it the audience, or the attitude of the publishers and marketing people?

JR: …You see a lot more experimentation these days, in terms of the story and the meaning, happening in indie games. Because of course when you’re spending $100 million on a triple-A game it’s hard to… I think for example it would be very interesting to have a game where the main character is very old and so even walking to the bus stop is a challenge. I don’t know if that would be a whole game but maybe, for example, a game where you play as different people and you have little bits of their lives to live through.

But I think to deliver that in a compelling way you have to have a real budget for next gen, you can’t do that in indie games. So it is the bigger publishers that will need to take risks. But I think going on a pitch where you’re spending $100 million and where you’re saying, ‘My main character is having a hard time walking to the bus stop, it’s going to be awesome!’ is difficult.

Both: [laughs]

GC: Of course you’re in charge of Ubisoft Toronto now, but am I right in thinking that wasn’t set up specifically to be a next gen studio? But if it wasn’t was there any other specific remit behind its creation?

JR: It was set up to be triple-A from the start. What you usually do when you set up a studio is you start with mobile games and ports and that sort of thing. It’s very rare to start where you are the lead studio right away, on a big budget triple-A game. So that was a significant risk, and I think a great strategy given that our objective is to be 800 people within 10 years.

So basically, given that we’re ramping up the studio so quickly, if we started on smaller projects we wouldn’t have been able to attract the type of senior talent that we were able to get at Ubisoft Toronto. By having a big franchise from the start and being the lead studio and having this real creative freedom, and a big mandate, means I was able to get some of the most senior people from across the industry who had already been the creative director on a big title or already been the art director on Max Payne or Prototype.

And they were interested in coming to now take the next step in their career, which is to build a team and be in on the ground floor and influence the culture and all that stuff. But it is a different strategy than most studios take.

We bet she’s good at Excel too

GC: So how does that work exactly? How do start from scratch on a project that uses hundreds of people and costs hundreds of millions of dollars?

JR: So we also actually collaborated on Rainbow [6: Patriots] a little bit, that allowed me to ramp up some people so that when we needed to get to production we had a team of people ready to move over. And now we’re already working on five projects simultaneously.

GC: Five?!

JR: Yes!

GC: Wow. And you haven’t announced any of them except Blacklist?

JR: Actually, it’s five after Blacklist.

GC: You must be a wizard at Microsoft Project.

JR: [laughs] We have said we’re collaborating on the Assassin’s Creed franchise but we haven’t said which games. And we’ve said that some of them are new IP.

GC: OK, so that’s not Assassin’s Creed IV?

JR: No, it’s a… future game.

GC: So how do you start work on a new IP? Is that just someone coming into the office one day with an idea or are you sitting there for days brainstorming ideas?

JR: It starts with a core team of developers who have an idea and they’re passionate about bringing that idea to life. So it’s people that have worked together and have shipped a game together and have a good working relationship.

Actually, when I was at Ubisoft Montreal I was executive producer on Assassin’s Creed but also responsible for two new IPs that were being developed, so I was executive producer on Watch Dogs and also Mighty Quest for Epic Loot.

So it’s cool, I’ve had the luck of being a part of a lot of new IP creations and pitches at Ubisoft. And the commonality is that you always have a talented group of people who’ve worked together before, who have a good working relationship, and who want to go together in one direction.

GC: I think most people would agree that Ubisoft have a good batting average when it comes to the quality of their games, but there are some general criticisms. There was an interview the other day that many found disturbing, where a Ubisoft marketing guy said that everything that you do is is envisaged as a franchise and that you wouldn’t start anything unless it was going to be part of one. As well as the games may or may not turn out, that does not sound like the best way to start a creative process.

JR: I don’t think that that’s really true, because for example we have… oh my goodness… I don’t even know if it’s announced yet.

[Confers with an attending PR woman who makes it clear it hasn’t been.]

JR: Okay, well there’s this one game that we’re working on [laughs] and it’s definitely not meant to be a franchise. But obviously, if you can create something that has the potential to be a franchise then that’s good for the business.

GC: Oh sure, but to start with that idea in mind seems wrong. I mean if your bus stop idea is amazing but it’s just a one shot game, does that mean someone at Ubisoft is not going to allow it to be made?

JR: No, I don’t think so.

GC: Or would they say okay, but it has to be a downloadable game. Is that the thing?

JR: They might say it has to be a downloadable game, yeah.

GC: So the game you’re not allowed to mention, is that retail or digital?

JR: No, I think that will also be a boxed product too. [laughs]

GC: The other general complaint levelled against Ubisoft is that they really do go overboard with the sequels and spin-offs. Assassin’s Creed is not only now a yearly franchise but seems to be turning into a numbered yearly franchise. Is that entirely healthy?

JR: Well, Assassin’s Creed III is the fifth game in the series! [laughs]

GC: I know, I know! But I look at IV and it looks great, but I think: ‘Does that really have to be an Assassin’s Creed game?’ Wouldn’t it have been just as good, perhaps even better, as a straight pirate game? I mean, people like pirates don’t they?

JR: [laughs] It’s a good question.

GC: But it must be frustrating to think every idea has to be shoehorned into an existing franchise. It has to be Tom Clancy’s something-or-other or a new Far Cry. I mean what’s Far Cry? That’s not a franchise! There’s no connection between any of those games except they’re open world.

JR: And what about Blood Dragon? That has nothing to do with it! [laughs]

GC: Is that the point, maybe? That you’re just using the IP to draw people in and then doing whatever you want in the actual game?

JR: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m in this role of managing director now, which is much more of a business type of role. But ultimately I started out as a developer, so sometimes I have my ideas as a developer which are different to my ideas as a business person. [laughs]

GC: But there must be a point where you get to number five in a franchise after just six years, and you think, ‘There’s been an awful lot of these’. And with Assassin’s Creed, that’s not even counting spin-offs and portable games. You can have too much of a good thing you know.

JR: I agree. I think the approach that Ubisoft is taking is that as long as the fans are engaged and that we continue to see that there are more and more people buying… each Assassin’s Creed there must be demand for another one, right? So that’s kind of the simple business point of view on it.

GC: It’s interesting that Rockstar, for example, say the opposite though. They purposefully don’t put out a new sequel for at least two or three years in order to build up demand and to ensure quality. Is there some accountant at Ubisoft looking at these two approaches and deciding which to follow based on some profitability equation?

JR: I don’t really know, I’d love to talk to someone at Rockstar…

GC: I’d love to talk to someone at Rockstar! But they don’t really do that kind of press.

JR: [laughs] Because they do seem to have their own type of strategy, right? And it does work and I kind of love it. They only come out every once and a while, and they only put out a couple of trailers and everyone waits with baited breath and I wonder: is it only because they have GTA and it’s GTA or is it an approach that would work for other things? I don’t know. Maybe they do have data on it, or maybe not.

GC: As well as Ubisoft Toronto you’re also helping with Ubisoft’s efforts to adapt your games in to movies and comics and other media. But… I look at some of the recent movie announcements and I think: does the world really need a Gran Turismo movie? Can a Shadow Of The Colossus adaptation ever really work given the nature of the game and the track record of existing video game movies?

JR: Well they turned Where the Wild Things Are into a movie, that’s like a children’s book with three sentences in it! [laughs]

GC: OK, that’s a good example, but call me cynical but I can’t imagine the Shadow Of The Colossus movie having no dialogue until the last five minutes, or having a bit where you’re just silently riding your horse for 15 minutes while nothing else happens.

JR: Well, I think that the world does need a Splinter Cell movie, because I love that type of movie. I am a real… I can just consume so many spy action movies. Like Mission: Impossible or whatever… there can’t be enough of them for me. And I think that ultimately the spy fantasy has a lot of room to evolve. It’s been kind of stuck in the same formula for a little while. And I think we have an opportunity with Splinter Cell to kind of own a new type spy fantasy in general, and hopefully the movie will help us to do that.

GC: But isn’t the problem with most video game adaptions that almost all story-based games are heavily based on existing films? To the point where they’ll copy specific scenes, and characters, and plots. And while that works great in the game, when you adapt that back to the big screen there’s suddenly no point. There’s no point in an Uncharted movie because it’s just Indiana Jones. There’s no point in a GTA movie because it’s like a greatest hit collection of gangster films. When Splinter Cell is transformed into a linear non-interactive movie don’t you lose everything that was interesting about it?

JR: OK, so for example I loved the Lord of the Rings series and you could say the same thing, that those books didn’t need to be a movie because they are such great books and they’ve lived on for years.

GC: But no, because there are no other movies like Lord of the Rings. Even now after it’s been so successful there are almost no other fantasy movies even remotely similar. But I can go into HMV and buy a billion different spy movies. How do you make your movie distinctive in the face of that, considering the major distinguishing factor of the franchise is that it’s interactive?

JR: I think the key is… what we’ve done in the past in terms of games and movies and making a version of the movie after the game or the game after the movie is that typically we take the exact same story and we try and translate it to the medium. And there’s not a whole of freedom to the people making the movie or the TV or the game.

They’re told basically, by people who are in another industry… if it’s movie creators then it’s ‘Follow the exact story that’s in the movie and don’t change anything’ and then the people making the game don’t have an opportunity to make an amazing game. And I really think that the key to having a great franchise, whatever they call it these days… transmedia, I don’t know if that’s still a term [laughs].

GC: God I hope it’s not.

JR: [laughs] Making a great franchise and having it be great on all the other media requires a certain amount of letting go and acknowledging that you might not be the expert in your field. That you need to trust people in another field to make something great in that medium. And I think that’s a thing that some people have a hard time doing, because when you own your intellectual property you don’t want to let other people have control of it. And of course everyone believes they’re an expert in all things. [laughs]

The thing with Splinter Cell is that the conflicts are very believable, it’s Tom Clancy, it’s very realistic tech. It’s high tech but it’s very much of today. It’s not James Bond or even Mission: Impossible type scenarios, it’s very believable. And I think that there is an opportunity to deliver a really exciting spy thriller with action, and to have it be more grounded in reality. I guess you could say somewhere between one of the recent Kathryn Bigelow movies and one of those traditional spy movies but adding more of the realistic content.

GC: Hmm…

JR: You’re not convinced? [laughs]

GC: Well, I’d have to see it first. [laughs] If the movie works then I’ll be convinced! And I’m not picking on Splinter Cell in particular, it’s just obviously the example I have to use here. But all video game movies up to this point have been terrible and they all make the same mistakes. So if you manage to make it work you’ll be swimming very much against the current.

JR: Well, I’m not the one making the movie, just to be clear! [laughs] But it’s a good opportunity to prove things wrong.

GC: I would love for you to do that, don’t get me wrong. Because then I wouldn’t keep wasting all my time and money at the cinema.

JR: [laughs]

GC: So just to finish, and I again I’m wary of appearing patronising, but can I ask the obvious question of what can be done to attract more women to the games industry? At the moment what’s stopping more getting involved? Is there any kind of institutionalised sexism or is there something in the nature of the role – perhaps the disruption of family life during crunch time – that makes it less appealing to women?

JR: So there’s a few different answers to the question. First of all, to consider a career in the games industry you have to play games. It wouldn’t really occur to you if you’re not spending your time with them, that this is something that you want to do. So I think it starts with having more girls playing games, which we are seeing more and more.

But it’s not patronising at all, I do consider it very flattering. I do get emails from random people or contacted through Facebook… or when I speak at events a lot of young women come and say to me that they’re excited to see me in the industry and that it makes them happy to see that there are women doing well and it kind of, I guess… nobody wants to work in an office where you’re the only woman. [laughs] It’s nice to know you’re not the only one.

GC: But that seems to be what it’s like. If I walk into a studio – or even a press event – and there’s a woman there, and she’s not in PR, it’s still unusual.

JR: We’re like unicorns! [laughs] But you know it is changing and it’s nice. I think more girls are playing games and more women are considering a career in the games industry and my management team at Ubisoft Toronto, it’s actually 50 per cent women in the senior management team.

GC: That’s unusual isn’t it?

JR: It’s very unusual in the games industry. But I don’t hire a woman just to hire a woman, I don’t hire for gender. I was just lucky enough to find the most talented people and half of the candidates I interviewed happened to be women. And they’re not only in HR! [laughs]

GC: Do you expect things to change quickly? Will the status quo as it exists now last for five, 10 years?

JR: It’s going to take time to change but we’re seeing a gradual shift of the grads that we hire. Right now, of the development teams we have at Ubisoft Toronto we probably have about 20 per cent women – it’s only the senior leaders that are 50 per cent. But of the grads that we hire we’re seeing higher than 20 per cent. So it’s slowly changing.

GC: Do you think that in turn will change the nature of video games, of the kind of games that are getting made?

JR: Oh yes. And for me it’s not just about having more women, it’s about diversity. If I look around at a team that’s supposed to be making a new IP and I see all white males around thirty years old wearing the same T-shirt and baseball cap I think, ‘God, this is not going to be a success’ because how can people with just one perspective…

There’s a worldwide market for games, it’s one of the only industries where we launch a game the same day worldwide. People play games everywhere so we have to be making games that appeal to a diverse group of people. And to really have games that appeal to a diverse group of people you have to have teams made up of diverse people.

GC: OK, that’s great. Thanks very much for you time. I know I’ve stolen a bit more of it than I should have.